Protest and Resistance in Angola and Brazil: Comparative Studies

By Ronald H. Chilcote

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520325869

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Protest and Resistance in Angola and Brazil

Published Under the Auspices of the African Studies Center and the Latin American Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles

Protest and Resistance in Angola and Brazil

Comparative Studies

Edited by

Ronald H. Chilcote

University of California Press

Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1972

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

Copyright © 1972 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN: O-52Q-O1878-8

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-142054

Printed in the United States of America

In memory of

Eduardo Mondlane

and

Fernando Monteiro de Castro Soromenho

Preface

There have been few scholarly comparisons of geographical areas of the Third World. As a contribution to such comparative study, the project from which the present volume evolved attemped to examine links between Brazil and Portuguese Africa. The objectives were to overlap the traditional area boundaries that separate specialists of Latin America and Africa, to focus on common themes from the perspective of varying social science disciplines, and to reassess and evaluate a variety of cases of protest and resistance. The specialized essays were to be analytical and exploratory, raising questions for possible future research.

The essays in this collection are substantially revised from the original form in which they were presented over an eight-week period from January to March 1968 to seminars of faculty and students at the Los Angeles and Riverside campuses of the University of California. The papers were distributed in advance to the seminars, and the intent was to include at least one African and one Brazilian paper at each session to provoke dialogue, debate, and discussion among Africanists and Latin Americanists alike. Of the original twenty-four contributors, ten were from the United States, seven from Brazil, three from Portugal, two from Moçambique, and one each from England and France. They represented the following disciplines: history (six contributors), political science (six), sociology (five), anthropology (four), anthropology-psychiatry (one), history-geography (one), and education (one). Ten contributors were Brazilianists, nine were Africanists, and five had undertaken research and study in both areas.1

My introduction describes the conceptualization that unifies the diverse essays. A conclusion attempts to synthesize a multitude of examples drawn from the historical experience of Brazil and Portuguese Africa. A classification is offered, and extensive reference to the literature is attempted in order to provide the reader with leads to some of the major primary and secon- dary source material. The body of this volume consists of individual essays representing varying views and perspectives focused on Angola and Brazil. The brief abstract preceding each essay attempts to synthesize content and ideas, as well as to tie the collection into an integrated and balanced whole. The rigorous criticism and dialogue of the colloquium contributed substantially to clarification and improvement of each essay. Nevertheless, some imbalance in scholarship and writing is inevitable. Further, these essays do not in any way signify consensus on the subject matter presented, and each author is solely responsible for his own essay.

Acknowledgment is due to many institutions and individuals for their contributions and assistance. I am grateful to the African Sudies Center and the Latin American Center of the Los Angeles campus, and the Latin American Research Program of the Riverside campus of the University of California who jointly sponsored the colloquium and provided the bulk of the research funds; additionally, I wish to thank the UCLA Chancellor’s Committee on International and Comparative Studies and the UCR Department of Political Science for financial support. Professors Leo Kuper and Paul Proehl, respecively director and former director of the African Studies Center, and Professor Johannes Wilbert, director of the Latin American Center, were all instrumental in shaping the project.

Among the many individuals who contributed, I am deeply grateful to Castro Soromenho, Gladwyn Childs, Helio Jaguaribe, Robert Levine, John Marcum, Candido Mendes de Almeida, Eduardo Mondlane, Adriano Moreira, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, A. da Silva Rego, Nelson Werneck de Sodré, and William Zartman for their essays which were not included herein. Most of their essays are being published elsewhere. Also I wish to thank Professors Carlos Cortês, Alan Green, Ludwig Lauerhass, Martin Orans, and Gunnar P. Nielsson of the University of California, Riverside; Professors Rupert Emerson, Peter Nehemkis, Edward Gonzalez, Kenneth Karst, and Charles R. Nixon of the University of California, Los Angeles; Professors Russell Chase and Francis Dutra of the University of California, Santa Barbara; Professors Timothy Harding and Donald Bray of California State College, Los Angeles; Professor Roger Cuniff of San Diego State College; and Professor Richard Kornweible of California State College, Sacramento, for their critical assessment of papers presented at the colloquium. Among the many graduate students who significantly evaluated the papers, I thank Bolivar Lamounier, Joel Edelstein, Aram Sogomoniun, Nancy Garson, Brian Nelson, Richard Stevens, Harry Meader, and George Zaharopoulos.

I am especially grateful to several researchers associated with the Latin American Research Program, Riverside: Amaury de Souza for ideas that helped in formulation of the colloquium; William Culver for critical comments and assistance on planning; Caesar Sereseres for assistance on the pre face and introductions to the essays and Paul Mason for editing and proofreading the manuscript. Additionally, the colloquium would not have been so efficiently organized without the careful planning of Hildaliza Arias Walkeapaa. Sarah Myers of the University of Chicago made substantial revisions and copy edited the essays into final draft form; her efforts have given balance and integration to the collection. I wish to thank also Diane Radke and Jessie Scott for typing the final draft. On the Los Angeles campus I would like to thank Pat Lunquist and Virginia Coulon of the African Studies Center who respectively typed and translated many of the essays, and Ana Bartos and Sandra Diaz of the Latin American Center for translating and typing other essays. Thanks are due also to Marcus Leh who meticulously prepared the index that accompanies this volume. Finally, I am especially grateful for the constructive criticism and useful suggestions of Professor Edward A. Alpers of the University of California, Los Angeles, who patiently examined the entire manuscript and contributed substantially to its present narrowed focus, cohesiveness, and balance.

Ronald H. Chilcote

Universiy of California, Riverside

1 A full report of the colloquium is in Ronald H. Chilcote, "Brazil and Portuguese Africa in Comparative Perspective,** Latin American Research Review, IV (Winter 1969), 125-136.

Contributors

MANUEL CORREU DE OLIVEIRA ANDRADE, born in 1922 in Nazaré, Pernambuco in Brazil, has a Ph.D. in economics and holds professorial positions in geography at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco and the Universidade Católica de Pernambuco. Among his numerous publications on Brazil are A terra e o homem no nordeste (Rio de Janeiro, 1963); A guerra dos Cabanos (Rio de Janeiro, 1965); Espaço, polarização e desenvolvimento (Recife, 1967); and A economia pernambucana no século XVI (Recife, 1962).

ROGER BASTIDE, born in Nimes, France, in 1898, is Professeur de Ethnologie Sociale et Religieuse, Faculté des Lettres et Science Humaines, Sorbonne and Directeur d’Etudes de Psychiatrie Sociale, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris. He was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from the University of São Paulo. A long-time student of African influences in Brazil, Professor Bastide has published many books and scholarly articles, including Brésil, terre des contrastes (Paris, 1957); Le Candomblé de Bahia (The Hague, 1958); Sociologia do folclore brasileiro (São Paulo, 1959); and with Florestan Fernandes, Brancos e Negros em São Paulo (São Paulo, 1959). His most recent work, published in 1967, is Les Amériques Noires.

DAVID BIRMINGHAM, born in England in 1938, is Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Dar es Salaam. He was Visiting Associate Professor of History in 1968 at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written The Portuguese Conquest of Angola (London, 1965), and Trade and Conflict in Angola: The Mbundu and their Neighbours under the Influence of the Portuguese 1483-1190 (Oxford, 1966) and has edited (with Richard Gray), Pre-Colonial African Trade (London, 1970).

RONALD H. CHILCOTE, born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1935 is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Riverside. His research on Brazil and Portuguese Africa has been supported by post-doctoral grants from the Social Science Research Council, the Organization of American States, and the Haynes Foundation. His publications include Portuguese Africa (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1967), Emerging Portuguese African Nationalism, 2 vols (Stanford, 1969 and 1972), and Party Conflict and Consensus: The Brazilian Communist Party, 1922-1910 (forthcoming Oxford University Press). He has published articles dealing with comparative aspects of Brazil and Portuguese Africa in Comparative Political Studies and Latin American Research Review. His present work is concerned with power structure in relation to underdevelopment and dependency in two backland communities of Northeast Brazil.

RALPH DELLA CAVA, born in 1934, is a native of New York City. He has taught history at Columbia College and presently is an Assistant Professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York. He has held a National Defense Foreign Language Award and a Foreign Area Fellowship to do field research in Brazil. He published The Northeast, in Robert Levine’s Brazil: Field Research Guide (New York, 1966) and Miracle at Joaseiro (New York, 1970).

SHEPARD FORMAN, born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1938, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He has held a Fulbright Study Grant, a National Defense Foreign Language Award, a Fulbright-Hays Research Grant, and a National Institute of Mental Health Pre-Doctoral Award and in 1969-70 was a Social Science Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex. He has published articles in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of Economic History, Journal of Latin American Studies, among others. His book The Raft Fishermen: Tradition and Change in the Brazilian Peasant Economy was published by Indiana University Press in 1970. His recent work has focused on the marketing system and peasant economy of Northeast Brazil, and he is writing a book on the peasantry in Northeast Brazil, to be published by Columbia University Press.

MARVIN HARRIS, born in 1927, is a native of New York City. He is Professor of Anthropology and former Chairman (1962-1966) of the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. He has held Ford Foundation, African Studies Program, and Social Science Research Council post-doctoral fellowships. His research has focused on race relations in Bahia (early 1950s and 1962) and in Moçambique (1956-1957). His research in Latin America also includes a study of highland Ecuador during 1960. His extensive publications include Town and Country in Brazil (New York, 1956); Patterns of Race in the Americas (New York, 1964); The Nature of Cultural Things (New York, 1964); The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York, 1968); and his most recent work, Culture, Man and Nature (1971).

ALFREDO MARGARIDO, a native of Vinhais, Portugal, is Assistant de Recherches in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes, Paris. His awards include the poetry and essay prizes of the Sociedade Cultural de Angola and a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (1964-1967). He is the author of Introduction à P histoire Lunda (a thesis for the EPHE); collaborated, under the direction of Marc Ferro, in compiling the Dictionnaire d’Histoire (Paris, 1971); of articles on anthropology, history, sociology of literature in L'Afrique Littéraire et Artistique, Annales, Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, Diogène, L'Homme et la Société, Le Mois en Afrique, Revue d’Esthétique, Revue Française des Affaires Politiques Africaines, Rivista Storica Italiana, etc. He was also editor of the literary supplement of Diario ¡Ilustrado, and literary editor for Guimaraes Editores. His present research is focused on Political and Economic Structures of the Lunda Empire.

RENÉ RIBEIRO, born in Recife, Brazil in 1914, is Professor of Brazilian Ethnography at the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, Recife, as well as Medical Director of the Sanatório Recife. He received his M.D. from the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco, and his M.A. in anthropology from Northwestern University. Among his published works are Cultos afro- brasileiros do Recife: um estudo de adjustamento social (Recife, 1952); Brazilian messianic movements, in Syvia L. Thrupp, ed., Millennial Dreams in Action (The Hague, 1962); and Análisis socio-psicológico de la posesión en los cultos afro-brasileños, in Acta Neuro psiquiátrica Argentina (1959).

MICHAEL A. SAMUELS, born in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1939, was researcher at the Center for African Education, Teachers College, Columbia University. He has held an Afro-Anglo-American Fellowship, as well as a fellowship from Columbia’s Institute for International Studies. He was Senior Staff Member at Georgetown University’s Center for Strategic and International Studies and currently is with the U.S. Department of State. His research has examined education within the Portuguese territory of Angola where he undertook field research in 1967; his publications include Methodist Education in Angola, 1897-1915, in Studia (1967); The New Look in Angolan Education, in Africa Report (November, 1967); Portuguese Africa: A Handbook (New York, 1969) and Education in Angola, 1878-1914 (New York, 1970).

AMAURY GUIMARAES DE SOUZA was born in Uberlândia, Brazil, in 1942. He holds degrees in sociology, political science, and public administration from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. His most recent positions in Brazil have been Associate Professor of Sociology at the Escola de Sociologia da Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro and, concurrently, Research Associate, Instituto Universitario de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro. In 1966 he edited Sociologia politica.

DOUGLAS LANPHiER WHEELER, born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1937, is Associate Professor of History and Chairman of the History Department, University of New Hampshire. He has been a recipient of a National Defense Education Act Fellowship in African Studies, a Fulbright Grant for study at the University of Lisbon, a Fulbright-Hays Research grant, and in 1966 a grant from the University of New Hampshire for research in Angola. While in Africa he was a temporary Lecturer at the University College of Rhodesia, Salisbury. He has published articles about Portugal and Portuguese Africa in the Journal of African History, Race, Foreign Affairs, and other journals, and has contributed an essay, The Portuguese and Mozambique, in John Davis, ed., Southern Africa in Transition (New York, 1966). With René Pelissier, he wrote Angola (New York, 1971).

Contents

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1 The African Response to Early Portuguese Activities in Angola

Chapter 2 The Tokoist Church and Portuguese Colonialism in Angola

Chapter 3 A Failure of Hope: Education and Changing Opportunities in Angola Under the Portuguese Republic

Chapter 4 Origins of African Nationalism in Angola: Assimilado Protest Writings, 1859-1929

Chapter 5 The Social and Ethnic Significance of the War of the Cabanos

chapter 6 The Cangaço and the Politic of Violence in Northeast Brazil

Chapter 7 The Entry of Padre Cicero into Partisan Politics, 1907-1909: Some Complexities of Brazilian Backland Politics Under the Old Republic

chapter 8 The Millennium that Never Came: The Story of a Brazilian Prophet

Chapter 9 Disunity and Discontent: A Study of Peasant Political Movements in Brazil

Chapter 10 Portugal’s Contribution to the Underdevelopment of Africa and Brazil

Chapter 11 Lusotropicology, Race, and Nationalism, and Class Protest and Development in Brazil and Portuguese Africa

chapter 12 Protest and Resistance in Brazil and Portuguese Africa: A Synthesis and a Classification

Index

Introduction

Ronald H. Chilcote

An understanding of social and political cleavages and resultant conflict and opposition in Brazil and Africa and knowledge of the historical experience of those areas immediately makes evident a pattern of protest and resistance among a variety of social and political movements. For an overview of these movements it is necessary first to identify a typology, then to analyze in depth.¹ Eric Hobsbawm has identified a variety of cases of primitive or archaic forms of social agitation in Europe, including social banditry of the Robin Hood type; the rural secret society (such as the Mafia); various peasant revolutionary movements of the millenarian sort; preindustrial mobs and their riots; and labor religious sects and the use of ritual in early labor and revolutionary organizations.² Hobsbawm’s classification and, more important, his analysis of specific cases in large measure inspired my attempt to develop a classification for Brazil (especially the Northeast) and Portuguese Africa (especially Angola), although the territories in the latter are less known, and historical cases of crisis and the movements that contributed to those crises are less studied, owing to the dominant colonial presence of the Portuguese for the past five centuries. Therefore, my classification of protest and resistance movements in Brazil and Portuguese Africa (see chapter 12) is an attempt to provide a general framework for the cases included in the present volume and to spur scholars to study more carefully the much- overlooked historical details that constitute the heritage of African peoples in the Portuguese territories. It is clear that individually our studies deal with small segments of total population in the areas under investigation and that they rarely concern or have any particular impact on national politics. When synthesized into a whole, however, trends and patterns become discernible, and these are significant in comprehending past as well as current developments.

A comparative examination of the impact of protest and resistance on social and political change in Brazil and Portuguese Africa necessitates the clarification of these concepts through definition and the elaboration of generalizations. While these concepts are interrelated, they also have many distinguishing characteristics.

Protest may be manifested as a complaint, objection, disapproval, or display of unwillingness to an idea, course of action, or social condition. Protest, it may be argued, stems from an active desire for change, while the process of developmental change frequently originates from the impact of protest. Protest relates to the forces that cause man to reconsider his present environmental situation. Protest may be the outcome of exposure to the materialistic and other benefits that an anticipated better life can produce. When rising expectations are not satisfied or demands for change are met by suppression, rejection, and nonintegration, protest is likely to follow the path of increasingly unstable and irrational means to accomplish goals. Protest activity may also be the direct result of institutional failure to accommodate immediate and local demands,3 as in the situation described by Michael Samuels.

Resistance, in the context of this volume, is the reaction of a given segment of population to certain environmental or political, economic, cultural, or social conditions which is accompanied by organizational mobilization directed toward the amelioration of adverse conditions.4 Amaury de Souza’s analysis of social banditry and Ralph della Cava’s and René Ribeiro’s focus on messianism relate to such conditions. Eduardo Mondlane maintains that, throughout Portuguese colonial rule in Moçambique, cultural rejection was always combined with political resistance.5 This resistance differed considerably from the protest of the Europeanized African assimilado, emphasized by Douglas Wheeler in his essay in this volume. While the former was characterized by unification and mobilization, the latter was marked by sporadic appeals manifested through the colonial press.

Resistance is frequently manifested through voluntary organizations, especially of a religious nature. Syncretist movements often fused native and colonial religions into a faith with political overtones. Protestant and Catholic missionaries sought local reforms, resulting frequently in suppres sion by the Portuguese authorities; it was through these overtly religious organizations that there occurred the politization and mobilization of many Africans6 Alfredo Margando describes in his essay.

Thus resistance within the indigenous populations of our areas of concern can be viewed as an embryonic stage of nationalism. Resistance functions to restructure the society in that new leaders emerge, traditional authority patterns are challenged, and anticolonialism provides for integration and cohesion among diverse ethnic and religious groupings. The Bissau dockworkers’ strike in 1958, for example, illustrated urban economic resistance which had widespread influence and ultimately led to the mobilization of the rural peasantry into a nationalist movement which struggled for the independence of Guiné.7

Protest and resistance may lead to crisis, an unstable state of affairs in which a decisive change may be impending. Crisis relates to physical and human problems. In Northeast Brazil, for instance, crisis may be the result of droughts or floods.8 It may also be caused by structural changes in the regional economy or by the successes and failures of attempts to find solutions to problems through welfare policies, the migration of people from area to area, and so forth. Crisis might be the result of class conflict and differences between oligarchical rulers and the mass of followers in a particular society. Crisis may well be related to the tensions and alienation of people who see themselves as nonparticipants in the decisions that shape a community. Crisis may also have something to do with the latent or manifest cultural patterns that persist in society over periods of time; violence, for example, is not an uncommon pattern among peasant populations in Northeast Brazil nor among tribal groups in Portuguese Africa.

The concepts protest and resistance relate also to opposition and conflict. Opposition is a manifestation of protest or resistance against the control and use of power in society and occurs when those subject to it experience shared feelings of exploitation and oppression. According to Blau, exploitation is dependent on social expectations, those of the group or groups subject to the power, which determine how they react to given demands for obedience, and those of the group in power which determine the extent of their demands for submission.⁹ Conflict may be the result of such expectations. Conflict basically means the incidence of disagreement over fundamental values in society. Such conflict may relate to major cleavages that have historically affected society, among which might be identified cleavages emanating from differences in social and economic class, religious sects, ethnic groups, ideological divisions, and geographical regions. From this we might generalize that the more issues defined in cleavage terms the greater the likelihood of political conflict. Also, the larger the number of cleavage- related issues that must be resolved simultaneously, the more unstable the political system.¹⁰

There are many reasons for our focus on protest and resistance and the specific examples identified and studied in this volume. First, such examples have been treated by others largely as a series of episodes unrelated in the historical process. The various interpretations offered have generally minimized the importance of such episodes in that process. Second, the movements we have identified have often been considered as marginal or unimportant phenomena, probably because the political allegiance or character of such movements is often undetermined and ambiguous, and because such movements are unlike more commonly known and understood social movements. For instance, these movements are often cast in a world of people who neither read nor write because they are illiterate; the people comprising the movements may be known only to their friends, often only by nickname; they are inarticulate, rarely understood when expressing themselves, and prepolitical—they have only begun to find a vocabulary in which to express their aspirations about the world; they have known a world long-dominated by a system of soldiers, policemen, tax collectors, and the like, all of whom they tend to distrust and despise; and they are confronted with the task of how to adapt themselves to modern society, its life and struggles, as well as how to influence that society to provide for their needs.

This collection of essays is divided into several parts. The first part concerns examples of protest and resistance. Contributors have developed case studies drawn from the historical experience of Angola and Brazil. Each contributor was to identify the principal issues or problems as related to his case study and to consider such questions as: Why had there been a crisis situation or popular resistance? Was this related to societal conditions? What were the political, social, economic, and psychocultural manifestations? Were natural barriers such as climate, terrain, and resources of significance? A second task was to examine wherever possible such theoretical aspects of protest and resistance in less developed areas of the world and to relate these to the particular case. Third, contributors were invited to evaluate the impact of the protest or resistance upon the society under study and, where possible, to comment on the relationship of conflict, tension, and alienation to issues and problem solving; the impact on recruitment, mobilization, and participation; the effect upon prevailing authority patterns and traditional and newly emerging leadership; the developmental perceptions of both elites and masses; and the restructuring of society at local, regional, and national levels.

In assessing the collection as a whole, I note that many of the authors have been concerned with at least one, if not all, of the following themes: human alienation from the sociopolitical system, violence, and nationalism. In examining alienation, many of the papers are asking the question: For whom and why is the existing sociopolitical system so unrewarding as to evoke collective protest, resistance, and violence? If it is true that almost any societal environment provokes protest and violence, then it is important to identify the social conditions that lead to protest and violence and to relate such conditions to the psychological orientations—be they real or imagined —of the actors involved. This is in fact what many of the papers have attempted, for the description and analysis is concerned with the incongruities between the values of certain individuals and groups and those of the existing political authority, the manner in which individuals believe themselves to be ineffective in reforming the sociopolitical system, and the type of behavior, such as protest and violence, that develops as a means to articulate the belief that the political system is unchangeable through peaceful alternatives.

The contributors have focused much attention on violence. Throughout the essays there is a fundamental consensus that violence is a significant topic for inquiry. Through the use of historical cases, efforts are made to explain violence in theoretical and comparative terms. There is a concern with the socialization patterns that sanction violence, with traditions of conflict, and with ideologies that justify violence and conflict.

The bulk of the essays in this volume are grouped according to geographical area. David Birmingham provides a framework linking the four Angolan essays. His concern is with the relationships of Africans and Europeans in the trade and commerce that shaped response and resistance during the seventeenth century. Alfredo Margando views Tokoism as a socioreligious outgrowth of early protest and resistance to Portuguese occupation and as one of several early messianic and syncretic movements which have provided a forum for criticism of existing traditional institutions and opposition to white colonial rulers. With a narrowed focus, Michael Samuels examines one example of African protest directed without success at achieving educational reforms and local autonomy within an oppressive colonial system. Douglas Wheeler concerns himself with four examples of early protest writings in an attempt to document ideas and activities that later became the foundation for assimilado nationalism. Thus these essays on Angola emphasize protest as the African response to colonial rule. A thread of sporadic and sometimes organized African resistance, which runs throughout Angolan history, is attributable, as Birmingham makes clear, to the trade and commerce which brought changes including exploitation, to the traditional economic system, and also to Portuguese attempts at cultural domination and military conquest.

The theme of African response to international trade, which runs through Birmingham’s essay, links, however crudely, with the theme of the impact of international capitalism in Brazil which runs through the five essays on the Brazilian Northeast. Ralph della Cava’s analysis, in particular, stresses the impact of international capitalism on the internal politics and economy of a small backlands community. Shepard Forman analyzes the impact of capitalism on the commercialization of agriculture and the resultant peasant response which allowed protest to be channeled through organizations. International conditions also shaped the military struggle described by Manuel Correia de Andrade. Even such an isolated instance of messianism as that reported by René Ribeiro becomes wrapped up in the events of the modern world and the space age.

The major difference between the two sets of essays relates to the two areas under study. Brazil is a fully established and, despite its diversity, more or less integrated society. Angola is a colony of the Portuguese overseas empire, underdeveloped, exploited, and fully dependent politically on Portugal and economically on Portugal, South Africa, Western Europe, and the United States. Thus, the Brazilian studies quite naturally focus on problems of political, economic, and social integration and on power struggles within both a local and national context. In contrast, the Angolan essays inevitably deal with how people avoid becoming integrated into a Portuguese-dominated society and how they persist in seeking an Angolan society. Yet, despite these differences, we do find that the participants in the Brazilian struggles described in this volume seem to be part of a system appropriately described as internal colonialism, that their life styles and dependence on the outside world are not much different from those of their African counterparts.11 Thus, in Portuguese Africa it can be argued that Portugal exercises a monopoly in exploiting natural resources, labor, and import-export trade. Portugal, as the dominant power, prevents other countries from exploiting the natural and human resources of the colony, or permits them to do so at will. This monopolization extends to mass culture, and all contact with the outside and with other cultures is funneled through the colonial power. Likewise in Brazil, especially the Northeast, internal colonialism persists as a structural phenomenon bound to the policies of the national government but ultimately tied to the pressures of international capitalism, in the trade, investment, and other forms. It is not strange then that a parallel set of conditions is found in the underdeveloped and exploited parts of Angola and Brazil described in many of our essays. In both areas local communities often remain isolated from a dominant center or metropolis which maintains a monopoly of commerce and trade, credit, and monoculture, as well as discrimination in labor, landholdings, income distribution, credit, and social life. The results are often deformation and dependence, decapitalization, migration, and exodus.12

The five Brazilian essays are linked by several other considerations. All relate to the messianic, often fanatical and charismatic, behavior of lower- class elements in the rural Northeast. Andrade’s attention to black and mulatto elements in the cabanos movement allows for an interesting comparison of black movements not only in Angola but elsewhere as well.13 The attention of Amaury de Souza and Shepard Forman to the mobilization of alienated peasants in a highly patriarchal order exemplifies a theme of class conflict which runs through many of our studies of Brazil and Africa. Della Cava deals with such conflict, but also with internal disputes within the ruling oligarchies of backlands Northeast Brazil, while Ribeiro’s study of a contemporary movement of rural lower-class elements illustrates the common social and economic conditions from which messianic movements of past and present have evolved.

As an overview, Marvin Harris and Roger Bastide offer comparative perspectives on Africa and Brazil. Their analysis applies to the territories of Guiné and Moçambique, as well as to Angola. Harris focuses on contrasting styles of colonialism and imperialism in the two areas. Both Harris and Bastide analyze patterns of underdevelopment in the two areas. They refute the Portuguese rhetoric of civilizing mission. While Harris examines the roots of Portuguese underdevelopment, Bastide assesses lower- class response to colonialism and domination.

Finally, as a conclusion to this volume, a classification of prenationalist movements in Brazil and Portuguese Africa is offered in an effort to reveal the wide range of examples of protest and resistance found in the experience of the two areas. As such, our conclusion extends well beyond the scope of the present volume. Our objectives are twofold. First, we hope scholars will begin to investigate in systematic fashion the many points of protest and resistance which shaped the history of Brazil and Portuguese Africa. An emphasis on such protest and resistance may lead scholars to reassess many generally accepted assumptions, theories, and myths. Second, we support our synthesis with extensive bibliographic reference to the available and generally sparse literature in the hope that the reader will read beyond the confines of this volume.

Part I Protest and

Resistance in Angola and Brazil

1 See chapter 12 for an elaboration of such a typology or classification.

2 Eric J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Manchester, England: University of Manchester Press, 1959).

3 A theoretical discussion of protest is in Michael Lipsky, Protest as a Political Resource, The American Political Science Review, LXII (December 1968), 1144-1158.

4 Resistance, as evident in the following discussion, is defined here as resistance to authority rather than as resistance to social change which may ensure the persistance of authority. On the latter, see Centro Latino-Americano de Pesquisas em Ciências Sociais, Resistências à mudança. Fatores que impedem ou dificultam o desenvolvimento (Rio de Janeiro, 1960).

5 See Eduardo C. Mondlane, The Struggle for Moçambique (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969).

6 Syncretic and messianistic movements are the focus of Sylvia L. Thrupp, ed., Mil- lenial Dreams in Action—Essays in Comparative Study (The Hague: Comparative Studies in Society and History, Mouton and Company, 1962).

7 On the relationship of resistance to nationalism, see T. O. Ranger, Connections Between ‘Primary Resistance’ Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa, Journal of African History, IX, no. 3 (1968), 437-453, and IX, no. 4 (1969), 631-641.

8 In his essay on Northeast Brazil, Albert O. Hirschman in Journeys Toward Progress (New York: Twentieth Century Fund, 1963), traces the relationship of major droughts to crisis and governmental decision making and assesses the results of those decisions as generally ineffective.

9 Peter M. Blau, Exchange and Power in Social Life (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964), pp. 227-228. Robert Dahl and colleagues have focused their attention recently on patterns of opposition; see particularly Dahl’s Political Opposition in Western Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), especially chapter 11, pp. 332-386.

10 Theoretical discussions of conflict are in Charles P. Loomis, In Praise of Conflict and its Resolution, American Sociological Review, XXXII (December 1967), 875-890; Norman A. Bailey, Toward a Praxeological Theory of Conflict, Orbis, XI (Winter 1968), 1081-1112; and Douglas Bwy, Dimensions of Social Conflict in Latin America, The American Behavioral Scientist, II (March-April 1968), pp. 39-49.

11 See Pablo Gonzalez-Casanova, Internal Colonialism and National Development, in Irving Louis Horowitz, Josué de Castro, and John Gerassi, eds., Latin American Radicalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1969), pp. 118-139.

12 For the Brazilian case, see the important analysis of capitalist development of underdevelopment by André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967), especially pp. 143-218.

13 The revolt of Nat Turner, for example. See Herbert Aptheker, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion (New York: Humanities Press, 1966), and William Styron, The Confessions of Nat Turner (New York: Random House, 1967).

Chapter 1 The African Response to Early Portuguese Activities in Angola

David Birmingham

[The trading relationships of Africans with Europeans shaped both their positive response and their resistance during the seventeenth century. In some regions it may have been the intense African demand for foreign consumer goods which was the dominant economic force in the slave trade. Once trade had begun, African peoples adapted themselves and their institutions with great skill to the shifting pattern of overseas trade. The Portuguese failure to achieve economic gains by cultural colonization led them to seek military domination, but this was effectively resisted by the military systems of the African kingdoms. Attention is drawn to the surprisingly effective military tactics of the Africans and to the role of weapon technology. Military conquest was attempted because Portugal was economically too weak to maintain efficient trade. African traders, however, successfully sought new outlets and new trading partners which allowed for greater profits.]

Because Angola’s role in history has predominantly been that of a supplier of labor (mão-de-obrd) to other parts of the world, including São Tomé, the Costa de Mina, Porto Bello, Brazil, Potosi, and the River Plate, the problems involved in being a large-scale supplier of involuntary migrants should be examined. Since this is not at present feasible for the nineteenth-

•This essay, written in the early part of 1968, aimed to point out the sparsity of Central African historical studies, and to illustrate some of the interesting themes. Since then the situation has been revolutionized, as four major historians have begun to publish in the field. Joseph C. Miller has worked on Cokwe and Kasanje, Jean-Luc Vellut on Angola and the Kwango states, Phyllis Martin on the Loango coast and its hinter- century context, this essay will attempt to look at them within the framework of earlier Portuguese activities in Angola.1 2 In so doing care will be taken not to overemphasize the importance of the slave trade in the overall economic picture of Angola, and time will be devoted to examining the significance of other commercial attractions.

Any study connected with the slave trade and its related activities faces a number of unsolved general questions. The field of slave trade studies has not attracted either European or African scholars. Much more has been written about the effects of African arrivals in the New World than on the effects of their departure from the old one. Historians have tended to make the tacit assumption that the driving force behind the trade was the economic strength and expanding force of Europe and its colonies. Africa is cast in the role of a passive milch cow, and the European slaving entrepreneurs, as rapacious wolves capable of extorting the manpower they required by means other than an equable exchange. This image of the slave trade as a relationship between grossly unequal partners is now undergoing reassessment. How far the pendulum will swing is not yet clear. Certainly African states now have to be studied in great detail to understand their motives, politics, structures, and attitudes; the reassessment may even go so far as to suggest that they played not only an active role in the Afro- European relationship, but a dominant role. It may come to be argued that at least in some regions, at some periods, it was the intense African demand for foreign consumer goods that was the dominant economic force in the slave trade. This is a very different proposition from the stereotype of Europeans buying slaves for handfuls of worthless trinkets.

The prelude to a study of African response and resistance to the Portuguese in Angola occurs in the old kingdom of Kongo. Superficially, the story of the Kongo kingdom and of the first hundred years of Portuguese presence in Central Africa is well known, but as yet there has been no serious study of the massive documentation that covers the history of Kongo- Portuguese relations.³ Fundamental questions about the aspirations of either side, about their relative political, technological, and economic strengths and weaknesses, about the nature of their associations and conflicts, have still to be more clearly examined. Occasional reference to Kongo will be brought into this paper for the purpose of comparison and discussion, but it will not form the center of focus.

The development of a more military confrontation between Portugal and Africa than that which occurred in Kongo might profitably be considered to begin in 1575, in the region of the lower Kwanza River. Both the date and the place of this development are significant. The date marks the successful completion of the first large-scale Portuguese military campaign in tropical Africa. This was the war in which a Portuguese army of six hundred men checked and eventually drove back the Jaga hordes who had driven them out of the Kongo kingdom. In the short run the Portuguese had been the winners; their use of firearms had apparently been decisive, although it was probably the psychological impact created by the noise and smoke of the matchlocks, rather than their speed or accuracy of fire, that had been decisive. Moreover, in this victory the Portuguese had been assisted by a substantial Kongo army led by the king and deeply committed to regaining its lost lands. With these two advantages the Portuguese won their first military exploit in West Central Africa between 1571 and 1574.⁴ Despite their victory, the Portuguese had learned from the Jaga that armed African resistance to foreign enterprise could be sudden and devastating. The confidence and security of the early colonial pioneers melted. After 1575 a new generation of men, who had grown up under the quixotic rule of King Sebastião, took charge of Portuguese affairs in Central Africa and determined that they would hold their land by right of conquest and not

(Louvain, 1963); R. Delgado, História de Angola (Lobito, 1953), Vol. I; and David

Birmingham, Trade and Conflict in Angola (London, 1966).

in hazardous cooperation with any Lusophile prince such as the king of Kongo.

If the date at which the Portuguese began their military enterprise seems significant, their choice of a site is probably even more so. It seems likely that, before the Portuguese attempted to make the Kwanza their high road into Africa, it was already an important trading artery. On the south side of the river, not far from its mouth, there are important deposits of rock salt.5 These were exploited in pre-Portuguese times and may have formed the basis of an important commercial system. The salt was quarried in slabs two feet long and used as a currency unit at least in the Angolan kingdom of Ndongo if not further afield. The Jesuit Gouveia, writing in about 1563, said that rock salt was the main richness of Angola and that traders came from many nations in the interior to buy it. He referred to one people in particular, the Dambia Songe, who came from seventeen days’ journey beyond Angola to buy salt, and who were very familiar with the far interior.6 A century later Cadornega described Lunda traders who came to the fringes of Angola to buy salt, suggesting that the trade continued to be important.7

In addition to rock salt there were pans of marine salt along the coast north of